AMERICAN JOURNAL OF DISEASES IN CHILDREN, Volume 141: Page
128,
February 1987.

Sir.-- Before the mid-1970s, the American standard of care
included neonatal circumcision, a minor surgical procedure
that promoted genital hygiene and prevented later penile
cancer as well as cervical cancer in female sexual partners.
More recently, evidence has suggested that adequate hygiene
is all that is needed and that circumcision is an unnecessary
and traumatic procedure. In 1983, the American Academy of
Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetrics and
Gynecology jointly agreed that routine circumcision is not
necessary,1 and third-party
payers are increasingly refusing to pay for the procedure.
Whether recent evidence of a decreased incidence of urinary
tract infections in circumcised male infants 2 can stem the anticircumcision
tide is questionable.

The purpose of this communication is to offer some solace
to the generations of circumcised males who are now being
told they have undergone an unnecessary and deforming
procedure, which may also have been brutal and
psychologically traumatic. To them I offer these lines:

Ode to the Circumcised Male

We have a new topic to heat up our passions
--
the foreskin is currently top of the fashions.
If you're the new son of a Berkeley professor,
your genital skin will be greater, not lesser.
For if you've been circ'ed or are Moslem or
Jewish,
you're out side the mode; you are old-ish not
new-ish.
You have broken the latest society rules;
you may never get into the finest of schools.
Noncircumcised males are the "genital chic"--
if your foreskin is gone, you are now up the
creek.
It's a great work of art like the statue of
Venus,
if you're wearing a hat on the head of your
penis.
When you gaze through a looking glass, don't think
of Alice;
don't rue that you suffered a rape of your
phallus.
Just hope that one day you can say with a
smile
that your glans ain't passe; it will rise up in
style.